There are multiple methods of installing Tapestry, the preferred method of installing Tapestry is to download the .phar archive available from the projects github releases page here and placing it into your PATH.

Once downloaded unzip the tapestry-x.x.x.zip and place the tapestry.phar and (if on windows) tapestry.bin files in to a folder that is within your %PATH%. If completed successfully typing where tapestry on widows or which tapestry on linux will return the location path for where you have installed Tapestry.

To test that you have successfully installed Tapestry you can run tapestry --version in your terminal and you should see something similar to Tapestry version 1.0.9-dev, environment local in return.

The default project scaffold, for convenience comes with Laravel Elixir bundled in; before we continue you will need to run npm install to install it. For more information on the defined gulp tasks that come with Laravel Elixir, click here.

To build your Tapestry website you execute the build command within the my-first-website folder:

$ tapestry build

This will build the files found in the source directory and output them to the build_local, local is the default environment for Tapestry and the build command accepts a --env argument with which you can define the environment, e.g the following will output to build_development:

The default project scaffold comes with Laravel Elixir, this provides out of the box tasks for less, imagemin, browserify and browserSync. Install via npm install and then gulp watch to preview your site.

browserSync will open a new browser window/tab automatically and reload the page every time a change is noticed. I have noticed one distinct bug with the file watcher on Windows in that it will not notice if you add a new file to the watched path - in that case I personally execute tapestry build in a separate terminal.

Now that you know how to build and preview your website, click here to learn how to deploy.